Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

T R E 4 5 O N

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. don’t touch it.”

Democrats have delivered the Square Deal, the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and now… the Big Joe Biden Deal.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

Please don’t feed the bears.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Republicans in disarray!

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

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Archives for February 2009

I’ll Take “They’re Not Very Bright” for 1000, Alex

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Eve Fairbanks discusses the theatrics and cunning stunts of the last few weeks from the GOP and asks a fair question:

Why are Republicans taking so many pages out of their failed candidate’s campaign playbook?

The Republican Party has been using a grab-bag of strategies to counter Obama’s policies over the past month. They rail against the stimulus package for its (supposed) pork. They hammer home their points with gimmicky videos and props. They speak in warrior rhetoric and revel in heroic, fighting-man stunts. But if there is one strand running through all these strategies, it is that they evoke a discomfiting feeling of deja vu. We’ve seen this stuff before: The GOP is currently reliving John McCain’s presidential campaign. The return to the strategies of their fallen candidate may be the saddest illustration of the current state of the party.

I honestly think it is because of the echo chamber, and because they simply have not had to think for so long that the echo chamber just rules. As far as I can tell these days, there are only three events Republicans remember throughout history, and those three events are the basis for every decision they make. The events are WWII (in which a damned furriner, Churchill, is the conservative hero), the Reagan administration, and the Republican take-over of Congress in Clinton’s first term. It doesn’t matter that they “misremember” those three cherished memories and don’t seem to have the ability to accurately assess those time periods. If you are wondering why the Bush administration and the past eight years is not one of those three memories, it is because they decided the day he left office that he is not a true conservative. Down the memory hole with you, George, and take those damned dogs with you!

Let’s just take one of these to prove the point. As WWII is one of the pivotal moments Republicans remember, every enemy is Hitler -Saddam Hussein? Hitler.

Putin? Hitler.

Kim Jong Il? Hitler.

Barack Obama? Hitler.

Likewise, anyone who does not do precisely what the wingnut crowd wants is instantly an appeaser and akin to Chamberlain.

Barack Obama- appeaser and Chamberlain.

Iraq War Critics- Appeasers.

Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and Arlen Specter- Appeasers.

And on and on. So what you have is a movement centered on a fictional history based on three events they don’t remember too well, and they are completely at the mercy of the echo chamber, which has themcompletely dumbed down by talk radio and the circle jerk of self-referential pundits that tells them exactly what they want to hear. If you remember correctly, the wurlitzer was telling us after the last electoral drubbing that this is a center-right nation, despite the fact the GOP got hammered.

In other words, they think they won because “conservative values” still rule the day. Now what are they doing? Well, since they were told they won, they believe it, and they are continuing to do the same things they did during the “winning” election, spicing that up with their favorite memories from their three events- calling everyone an appeaser, feigning fiscal responsibility while pretending no one remembers the last eight years, chucking out tax cuts as a solution for everything while pretending Reagan balanced the budget and never raised taxes (Health care a mess? Tax cuts! Market melting down? Tax cuts! Need some economic stimulus? Tax cuts!), and unifying in opposition to the Democratic President just like the good old days of 1993.

Like I said- they aren’t very bright. Break out the celebratory tire gauges, bitches!

*** Update ***

And this.

*** Update #2 ***

I swear to FSM that I did not see this until someone linked it in the comments:

But in the warped fantasy of Transatlantic Neoconomia, the world in which every diplomatic challenge is another 1938 and all peaceful negotiation is “appeasement”, any snub of St Winston is sacrilege, a sign that the Atlantic bridge is crumbling.

It’s too early to judge the tenor of Obama’s foreign policy. His taste in Oval Office decor bodes well, however, especially given Bush II’s disastrous tendency to view the world in Churchillian terms of good and evil.

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Getting It In Utah

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Credit where credit is due, because the Republican Governor of Utah gets it:

The Republican governor of Utah on Monday said his party is blighted by leaders in Congress whose lack of new ideas renders them so “inconsequential” that he doesn’t even bother to talk to them.

“I don’t even know the congressional leadership,” Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, shrugging off questions about top congressional Republicans, including House Minority Leader John A. Boehner of Ohio and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “I have not met them. I don’t listen or read whatever it is they say because it is inconsequential – completely.”

***

Unlike some of his Republican counterparts in other states, Mr. Huntsman said he will not turn back any of his state’s share of President Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus. But he said much of the spending is misdirected and more likely to bloat the government than boost the economy.

He said congressional Republicans failed to score political points for opposing the bill – only three Republican senators supported it – because the public saw them as objecting to being shut out by Democrats from helping write the bill rather than as taking a principled stand.

The governor said congressional Republicans are being frustrated by a lack of credibility on the party’s No. 1 tenet: fiscal responsibility.

“That’s why no one is paying any attention,” he said. “Our moral soapbox was completely taken away from us because of our behavior in the last few years. For us to now criticize analogous behavior is hypocrisy. We’ve got to come at it a different way. We’ve got to prove the point. It can’t be as the Chinese would say, ‘fei hua,’ [or] empty words.”

It still upsets me that this bill of a couple hundred billion in tax cuts (when did Republicans start opposing tax cuts?) and $4-500 billion in spending, mostly as stopgaps for state budgets and infrastructure spending, is characterized as wild spending, when the only reason for it is the horrible economy and there just isn’t a ton of “pork” spending in it. Regardless, it is nice to see that at least some Republicans out there get it- their problem is they simply have no credibility after the past eight years even if this WAS a larded up bill full of pork.

Put another way, it isn’t just dishonest, it is offensive. Having the party of Bush lecture you about out of control spending is like having a heroin addict chide you for putting too much sugar in your coffee.

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What if?

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Sorry but I have to indulge my WaPo chat fixation again today:


Washingotn, D.C.: Tonight, Obama will no doubt say he inherited this mess, not his fault, etc. What would have happened if Bush, after 9/11, got up there and said. We need to understand this was Bill Clinton’s fault for gutting our intelligence agencies in the mid 90s, being attacked three times and doing nothing and refusing to take bin Laden when Sudan offered him in the 90s. How do you think that would go over?

With such a hypothetical question, it’s really hard to say how that might have gone over, right?

Update: I googled “Bush blamed Clinton for 9/11” and here’s the first thing that came up:

“They looked at our response after the hostage crisis in Iran, the bombings of the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the first World Trade Center attack, the killing of American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa, and the attack on the USS Cole. They concluded that free societies lacked the courage and character to defend themselves against a determined enemy… After September the 11th, 2001, we’ve taught the terrorists a very different lesson: America will not run in defeat and we will not forget our responsibilities.”

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Burkean alarm bells

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This is why I hate conservatives, especially the ones who pretend to be intellectuals:

The people around Obama are smart and sober. Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.

Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells. I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy.

Where were those Burkean alarm bells when we set out to remake Iraq? (And no, this doesn’t count.) Why do they only go off when a Democratic president attempts much-needed domestic reforms and not when a Republican president forms a Holy Alliance to create democracy in the Middle East?

No amount of masturbating about Burke and Oakeshott and the rest of your little heroes is going to change the fact that the ideology you supported has harmed this country, perhaps irreparably. Maybe it’s time to leave those books (that you probably don’t understand) behind and start reading budget reports and health care plans. That goes for Sully (whose blog I do genuinely like) too. Give it up.

There’s an episode “Cheers” where Diane describes something she’s written as “Joycean”. Carla says “if Joycean means stupid, then I agree.” That’s how I feel when I hear conservatives prattling on about “Burkean” this and “Oakeshottian” that and the importance of “intellectual integrity”. You guys aren’t intellectuals and you have no integrity.

In the end, I don’t think it’s likely that there are many political philosophers of note who would have recommended sending as unaccomplished a man as George Bush to the White House or running four hundred billion dollar deficits during times of economic expansion or persisting with a health care system that costs twice as much per person as any other system and offers worst results. I don’t think that’s likely at all. I think it’s much more likely that people like Brooks (and to a lesser degree Sully) use faux erudition to mask their ignorance of policy details and lack of common sense.

Update: Sully is also mocking Brooks about this, which confirms what the thread already convinced me: that it’s totally unfair to compare him to Brooks.

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Math and the Wall Street Meltdown

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Via memeorandum, a pretty fascinating piece in Wired magazine on the market meltdown:

A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li’s work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. Today, though, as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li’s formula hadn’t expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system’s foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

David X. Li, it’s safe to say, won’t be getting that Nobel anytime soon. One result of the collapse has been the end of financial economics as something to be celebrated rather than feared. And Li’s Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees.

There have been a number of articles about this phenomenon, including this 2004 piece noting that a number of theoretical physicists were heading to Wall Street, and this Washington Post piece from 2007 about the same topic. I distinctly remember another long piece in the Washington post about this, but I can not find it right now.

At any rate, every time I think of the theoretical thinking behind all this, I am reminded of a story one of my old international relations profs told me almost two decades ago about Mike Tyson (I have no way of verifying the quote, as I have looked for it and can never find it. Might be my prof was bs-ing). As the story goes, in an interview with Tyson, a reporter told Tyson that the fighter he was about to face had a strategy for this, and a strategy for that, and a strategy to counter all of Tyson’s strengths, and how did Tyson plan to deal with that. According to my prof, Tyson responded: “They all have their strategies. Then I hit ’em.”

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A Petty Man

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This, from John McCain at the Fiscal Responsibility Summit, was pretty amusing:

MCCAIN: One area I wanted to mention that I think consumed a lot of our conversation on procurement. It was the issue of cost overruns and the Defense Department. We all know how large the defense budget is. We all know that the cost overruns, your helicopter is now going to cost as much as Air Force One. I don’t think that there’s anymore graphic demonstration of how good ideas have cost taxpayers enormous amount of money. So the — we will and I know that you’ve already made plans to try to curb some of the excesses in procurement. We really have to do that. We’re going to have to pay for Afghanistan as you well now and we’re not done in Iraq, but most importantly, we have to make some tough decisions, you, Mr. President have to make some tough decisions, not only about what we procure, but how we procure it…

What a small, petty man. The attempt to blame Obama (“your helicopter”) is just another sign of how these guys are spinning their wheels. President Obama had NOTHING to do with the decisions regarding the helicopter and had nothing to do with the cost overruns, as these were all events and decisions made from well before he assumed office. From May 17th, 2007:

Lockheed Martin is projected to overspend by 34 percent on the development contract for the new presidential helicopter, according to Pentagon and Navy officials.

Costs for system design and construction of initial helicopters needed by October 2009 and more capable choppers for 2015 are estimated to total at least $2.4 billion, up from the $1.79 billion job Lockheed Martin won in January 2005, according to the Navy and the Defense Contract Management Agency.

Putting aside the fact that the President and Congress are already working on legislation to address cost overruns, on May 17th, 2007, Barack Obama was not even the party nominee, let alone President.

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At Least This Time They Aren’t Calling It The War of Northern Aggression

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Fun times in wingnuttia:

State governors — looking down the gun barrel of long-term spending forced on them by the Obama “stimulus” plan — are saying they will refuse to take the money. This is a Constitutional confrontation between the federal government and the states unlike any in our time.

In the first five weeks of his presidency, Barack Obama has acted so rashly that at least 11 states have decided that his brand of “hope” equates to an intolerable expansion of the federal government’s authority over the states. These states — “Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, California…Georgia,” South Carolina, and Texas — “have all introduced bills and resolutions” reminding Obama that the 10th Amendment protects the rights of the states, which are the rights of the people, by limting the power of the federal government. These resolutions call on Obama to “cease and desist” from his reckless government expansion and also indicate that federal laws and regulations implemented in violation of the 10th Amendment can be nullified by the states.

So this is what it was like during the Clinton years? I can honestly say, I remember it differently, being on the “other” side back then, but right now these folks are just looking batshit insane.

God help us if Obama ever lies about a blow job.

Bonus thought: Can you imagine what kind of “insurgency” these guys would be running if they had lost in 2008 the way the Democrats did in 2000? Here, they flat out got kicked out of office, rejected by large majorities, and they have decided the solution is to get their freak on.

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